Google+ is Growing Like Crazy | Hacker News Reader

Google+ is Growing Like Crazy

plus.google.com

121 pointscalufa45 comments

Just so people are clear - this isn't THE Paul Allen. This Paul Allen is a Utah-based entrepreneur.

I'm sure that's obvious to most here, but I thought it was worth pointing out.

To be honest, I was first a little excited when I saw the headline, but I realized it was a different person when I saw the profile picture. The title of the post is a bit confusing since I didn't know of the Utah-based Paul Allen.

My surname is so rare that by United States government policy it does not show up on federal lists of surnames by frequency.

http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/dist.all.last

I am on Google+.

A New York Times article

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17surnames.html

establishes some context on the frequency of various surnames in the United States. English surnames are predominant, but Spanish surnames are gaining relative frequency.

P.S. Responding to another comment here, surely as more companies get into social networking, and social networking becomes a growing share of all Internet activity, third-party organizations will have to agree on standardized methodologies for estimating users of each service, to guide advertisers and investors, and to answer the questions of journalists. For the moment, I notice that Google+ has already achieved a status previously achieved for me by HN and by Facebook--I tend to keep a tab open to it at all times while I am browsing the Web.

Another problem with G+: it's not happy that people have non-GMail email addresses. Let's say I have my friend John Smith jsmith@gmail.com in a circle. G+ keeps asking me if I want to add him still. Why? Because in my GMail, I have also emailed him at john_smith@hotmail.com. There's no way for me to tell it that these are the same person.

So I think G+ may be double-counting a significant number of users.

Do you have a single Google contact with both emails, or two contacts, one for each? Just curious to see if that might make a difference.

No I can confirm that it's not taking contacts into account. I think it's because it's non-trivial to come up with a UI for picking the email to send the invite to.

You could send it to the address you've sent/received from most recently. Or prioritize on gmails, since those are already Google accounts

Google won't count that as two users unless John as two Google accounts with Google+ profiles. You can verify non Gmail address with Google and they should show up as the same contact.

It's getting them from my GMail activity near as I can work out.

Likely so but it isn't inflating Google+ user numbers.

If both addresses are listed under the same contact in Gmail, I'm pretty sure it won't do that (I have a friend with both Google and Yahoo addresses and it identifies her correctly). I bet your Gmail contact list has duplicate Johns and that's why Google+ thinks he's two people.

I have a lot of people with multiple email addresses, and as long as they are merged into a single contact Google+ no longer asks me to add them to a circle...

Downvote accident on my mobile. Sorry, someone get him that point back, please. Thanks in advance.

Buzz had a similar opening http://goo.gl/kA0pH Such measures are meaningless because no effort is required to join for existing G users. Lets wait for Facebook or Twitter conversion rates to come out before breaking out the Crystal

You still need an invite and then walk through the sign up process, even if you already have a Google account. Buzz was just dropped on all Gmail users out of nowhere.

The methodology offered in the comments, of googling for http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&biw=1366&bih=653&#... and taking the number of results returned for the number of users, seems more direct. Currently that returns about 6.5 million users, which is in the same ballpark.

I see about 2.8 million results from that query, but I'm not surprised the number changes a lot. The result counts are a very rough approximation calculated on the fly, and shouldn't be relied on for more than order-of-magnitude estimates.

The last name method is precise, but of questionable accuracy; the result count is probably more accurate, but very imprecise. Take your pick :).

That's interesting; if I anonymize by searching through Google Sharing, I also get 2.8 million results. Searching from my own IP address (though without being logged in) still gives 6.5 million.

I think that they are reorganizing the results based on if you are signed in with an account that has plus or not. There was someone who posted that their Google+ was "already" in the top 10 results and twitter wasn't even shown, but it was only true if you were logged in.

Hopefully they aren't doing something too drastic; there's allegedly already an ongoing antitrust investigation about how google orders its search results.

Maybe, but it's worth noting that I wasn't signed in, and don't have a G+ account, yet.

that's wrong, two of the first results are posts by Tom Anderson and Dave Besbris.

This returned about 6.5 million for me too. The strange, interesting tidbit I noted was that the user #s by no means conformed to Benford's law: I clicked through 5 pages of search results, and all of the user #s began with 11 or 10.

Great, but I can't use it because those who pay money for Google Apps for Domains are exluded from having a profile. No, I don't know why either.

I think calling G+ to be growing like crazy is misleading. Gmail itself has about 200 mio. users - migrating those users to a G+ account shouldnt be that difficult. What's really gonna be interesting is whether G+ will be capable of attracting new users, which are not yet part of google's 'services cloud'.

True, but I also think it will be interesting to see whether the users that get a Google+ account actually use it. I use Twitter for purpose-less tech/business opinions. I use Facebook rarely to talk to my brother and sister. I use Skype for work conversations. I don't yet see people using this enough for me to want to move to it.

edit; If they created some kind of BBM-type android service that sat on top of Google+ I think it would make me switch my SMS usage because I have a lot of friends that use Android phones...

BBM-type android service

You've described Huddle[1], part of the Google+ app for Android.

"Huddle lets you send super-fast messages to the people you care about most."

Presumably, Huddle will be part of the Google+ app on other platforms, too.

[1] https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.app...

It's not just migrating users, its keeping them interested in Google+ as opposed to Facebook.

Whether Google+ is really growing like crazy or not, it appears that there is definitely a place for a new social network outside of facebook. And on that note could not help think that Apple probably missed a great opportunity with Ping.

And I'm glad they did. Judging from Apple's business model, it would have been yet another closed off, keep your data social network. I've been dying for an open network like Google+, and I think things played out quite well.

What's open about Google+? You can delete your account and download your data from Facebook as well; you can also write third party applications that read and write from/to Facebook, unlike Google+.

Google allows you to export your data through their "Google Takeout" service. This includes your contacts and circles, unlike facebook, who is now pushing harder than ever to keep your contacts in Facebook.

facebook.com -> Account settings -> Security -> 'Click here to download a copy of the data you've put on Facebook.'

Right. Export everything but internet contact info...the most useful parts they keep locked up. That button does not export email addresses. Fake export.

I just hope that Google+ keeps the "Google Takeout" feature and doesn't close up. "Openness" was Google's selling point for Android when it first came out, and yes, it's still "open", but nothing like what it once was. This just seems like a deja vu waiting to happen.

I'll let Google explain the exact same product decision for their social network Orkut in 2009:

"Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click. In order to protect user privacy, we now exclude email addresses from the CSV export file."

http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/orkut-slows-hemorraging-to-...

They're right. Programmatic export of friends' email addresses is too ripe for abuse in the world we live in.

As this article (http://tinyurl.com/64fhwdq) pointed out:

[T]wo days after Buzz went live, Google posted a blog entry bragging that "tens of millions" of people had checked it out, and created more than 9 million posts and comments.

At some point, interest died.

So far Google+ is filled with Googlers, reporters, and tech enthusiasts. They're posting a lot, enjoying the Hangouts feature, and driving traffic to tech news sites.

But it's still way too early to know whether Google+ will get any traction with mainstream users -- the 750 million people who are on Facebook today.

Please, no TinyURLs that obscure the ultimate destination. URLs of any length work just fine here, with their display automatically clipped while the full URL is available for mouseover inspection. For example, here's how your original long URL displays:

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-buzz-started-off-reall...

// in 1 hour I found 1 million users, so I guess is more than 4.5 millions

where are all these people getting their invites? Dropping hints with my Google contacts hasn't worked...

Invites have been open all day. I'll invite you if you don't mind being disconnected entirely from the social graph. Please add a way to contact you, or a link to a way to contact you, to your HN profile.

Thanks mate : ) Gmail added to my HN profile

Google Buzz also had "tens of millions" of people: http://tinyurl.com/64fhwdq

It was kind of forced to gmail users though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com